Tiokasin Ghosthorse: Learning from the Earth as an Elder(Ep460)

Written By kaméa chayne
Art by Merle Locke / Green Dreamer ft. Tiokasin Ghosthorse
“There is no word for environmentalist for Native people. It’s just how we are. Our thoughts are always placing Earth as our Elder. ”
— Tiokasin Ghosthorse

What does it mean to focus on learning from Earth, and not just learning about the earth? How might experiencing Ianguages of Indigeneity invite us into different ways of seeing and relating to the more-than-human world? And how do we honor the pains and emotional weight of these sobering times — while also staying present to the magic and beauty of life?

In this episode, Green Dreamer’s kaméa speaks with Lakota Elder Tiokasin Ghosthorse, who founded, hosted, and produced First Voices Radio, and who has a long history of Indigenous activism and advocacy.

Join us as we unravel the many layers of these times of severance, and deepen into the potentiality of learning from the Earth as an Elder.

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Tiokasin Ghosthorse on Green Dreamer
 

About our guest:

Tiokasin Ghosthorse is a member of the Cheyenne River Lakota Nation of South Dakota and has a long history with Indigenous activism and advocacy. Tiokasin is the Founder, Host and Executive Producer of First Voices Radio (formerly "First Voices Indigenous Radio") for the last 27 years in New York City and Seattle/Olympia, Washington.

In 2016, Tiokasin received a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize from the International Institute of Peace Studies and Global Philosophy in 2016.

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interview transcript

Disclaimer: Please note that Green Dreamer’s interviews are minimally edited (both audio and non-verbatim transcript) for clarity and brevity only. All statements should be understood as commentary based on publicly available information, and the views expressed in this interview are those of the guest and host only and do not necessarily reflect the views of Green Dreamer.

While we have made reasonable effort in our interview research and production process to ensure accuracy, we do not present our commentary as factual assertion and we are unable to guarantee the completeness or correctness of every piece of information shared. As such, we invite you to view our publications as references and starting points to dive more deeply into each topic and thread explored. Thank you for adventuring with us.

Tiokasin Ghosthorse: My roots. They go deep, deeper than my lifetime. And every minute, every breath is in honor of my ancestors from Turtle Island. That's the USA, North America, South America. Before that, they had other names. And so those roots go very far. But not to be cryptic, it's more like, yes, I come from a present-day reservation in South Dakota as a Lakota, of the two clans of Mnicoujou and Itazipcola. My mother and father are gone now. But in the present, I tie them together. We tie them together in the language of Akantu.

I'm naming this moment, “Akantu Wicasa”, which merely means a gift to the stars, becoming an Earth being from the ancient future, now.

So this would be the roots of who we are. That's including the creation story from creation to the present. The present moment where we are always in the present language. In my language, we always avoid a present-phobic moment. So the Akantu that is there with us, the Earth being from the ancient future now. It means that we are meant to do this interview, and when it later goes out, it will still be the same moment. And those around me that we don't see are still in the present. So the roots, in a sense, didn't begin anywhere, and they will never end anywhere. It's a continuum of our ancestors' DNA.

It sounds woo-woo in English because of the lack of spirituality, and more or less the dogmatic terminology we constantly use in a sense of domination. So, without domination, I introduced those roots that I feel constantly, and the language that is all energy. In our language, there's no nouns, no concepts, no need for that. There's always intuition.

And so we identify being here through intuition because that's related to all beings around, including those that we don't think in this language, that they don't have consciousness. So that's a long way of explaining roots. Otherwise, I can say, I come from the Cheyenne River, Lakota Reservation, in South Dakota. And I'm of these clans, and my experience is this. That’s too disrespectful to oneself and to those that we are representing in our blood. So yes.

Kaméa Chayne: Thank you for this much more expansive way of looking at our roots. There is a lot going on in the world right now that's pulling people’s hearts and minds in a million different directions. If you were to explain to a young adult or someone who's just starting to connect a lot of these dots and entering this rabbit hole of asking, how did we get into all of this mess? How would you even begin unravelling such an immense question?

Tiokasin Ghosthorse: Let me start this way, then I'll come to the point. When you talk to Native people, it's always about not getting a direct answer immediately. Because understanding your question takes some more effort, and in a respectful way than in just replying to it.

So speaking a coded language that English is, that we standardize everything into this language of English. And it's difficult because we are speaking in verbs versus nouns, so to speak, in coded language. You know, I have to switch codes, so to speak. And the reality is, going through your own experience, we can say at different times, but that's not true.

We are caught up in the trendiness of what time is, and so we are not paying attention to what we take for granted. The elemental consciousnesses around us, which is nature. And with the technology and industry, we speak less and less natural languages. We see things not as natural as they used to be, and we don't follow a natural law anymore. In other words, we are severed.

Our spiritual umbilical cord is severed from Earth because we got caught up in domination. And the trendiness is to be in the “now.” But it's a false now, it's not the same as Akantu.

We are worried about the future, and we don't understand the past because we tend to say that was yesterday. Today's today, and it's youth-driven. And so the youth without Elders is like forgetting the past that made you today. I'm not saying what's wrong with young people. It's like, we all have to, all of us, no matter what age, have to start giving more credence and more practicality. Now we think with Earth first. As Earth is going to overcome us, we are never going to overcome Earth.

Part of that is that the language we speak is one of nouns, one of control, one of domination. And I come from a language that doesn't have the word or concept for domination. So because we have to be related, we're in a relationship with all. I could put things in there, or we're just in a relationship with all.

We are not connected, because if you're disconnected, then you're severed. And you're looking for connection. If you've always known how to be in a relationship with all life, you'll never be disconnected. And I think the loneliness, no matter what age you come from, it is adolescent, and it’s searching. So you can see old people becoming old rather than Elders.

And we pay attention to one thing, which is hard for me to understand, which is called greed. Because you can look and measure people in that binary sense, almost in a pathological way. A cause and effect. And it's become our mantra. And there's much more than two dimensions. And we've been programmed and honed to join that because it's easier answered than lived.

So we tend to live our lives in this society, gathering information without ever experiencing what we know as knowledge and education. We could talk about many things, but many things are severed. And so one of my colleagues, Vanessa de Oliveira, who wrote the book, as you probably know, Hospicing Modernity.

Kaméa Chayne: I'm actually speaking with her this Thursday, so this is very aligned.

Tiokasin Ghosthorse: Beautiful. So yeah, say hello for me. That's what we are speaking about if we understand being in the present. And it's not about what's bad, it's more about what you're conscious of. 'Cause we've been caught in the conscience of right or wrong, and two-dimensional, good or evil. And in the Native languages that I've heard and know of, there’s more than two dimensions. Not me, self-centred language.

And I think part of that is how much we bought into, how much we've been convinced that there's only one way, and that one way is actually destroying cultures. Because that one way is not McDonald's, Mickey Mouse, or Silicon Valley. 'Cause many people across the world do not have computers. They cannot afford it. So the way we speak in English is very imperialistic, that everybody must be the way we are.

We judge poverty and wealth in the same breath because those who don't have money have the greed to be rich. Well, the rich never want to be poor. So the greed is the same. And that's a one-way. There's this cul-de-sac, and it's a loop. It leads to singularity. And that leads to dogma.

I think part of that is understanding the relationship versus the connectedness. So there is quite a bit to say to youth as there is to 80-year-olds who act like they're still young. And there's no longer the space to take your place and then move on your way. It feels like many people haven't lived their lives, and they're in desperation to live. And that has to do a lot with the pain of grief, and we forgot how to grieve in this society.

Many Indigenous peoples are still grieving while they're praising. And so it's a balance, but that balance doesn't exist in this modern society.

Kaméa Chayne: Yeah, there's already so much here that I'm curious to deepen into further. We've done a fair amount of episodes on the history of colonization, the creation of national parks, and conservation itself, rooted in colonial mentalities, and things like that. And something that I've been thinking about is how sometimes people will critique the field of environmentalism and say, if you look at the history of it, it was really predominantly white and male. I think a central part of that argument is getting at the systemic injustice rooted within this field of study. But I actually see it more like this worldview of environmentalism itself is colonial, right?

Like, this worldview of the environment being separate from human rights, separate from culture, spirituality, food, medicine, philosophy, storytelling, arts, crafts, fashion, and so on. That separation itself of the field is a colonial framing. And if we're talking about things like Indigenous rights and Indigenous sovereignty, all of those things, including the well-being of the land and water, are encapsulated and deeply entangled within that.

So I personally always feel called to trace things as deeply as possible. I'm at a point where I'm like, no matter where people's entry point is, whether it's personal health, or public health, or climate change, or whatever, if we're willing to be open-minded in being led down this rabbit hole to really get to the deeper roots of these different disciplines or fields of study, then we inevitably arrive at similar places in terms of needing to look at the history of colonization. And what it's done to separate all of the things that should be entangled, but have been kind of pried open and institutionalized and commodified and industrialized in some way.

So I think I'm curious to have you elaborate more on these layers of separation of things that are meant to be deeply entangled within community. And then, if it feels related for you as well, what do you mean when you reframe "people of color" to "people of culture?”

Tiokasin Ghosthorse: Yes. Thank you. You have been following the radio that I used to do.

So, people of culture are the number one enemy of people of civilization. People of culture follow the Earth rules, the natural laws. Sustainable versus sustainable development. And it makes me think about the echo, which is a memory for us. The echo of time, in this case, is how I would see it as the first Native from Turtle Island herself sees the ships coming. It would be a shock to know what they brought, as a Native from this land. So yes, they brought the religions, they brought laws. But one thing they didn't bring was the land. Those laws and religions they applied to this land without understanding it.

The people who keep it, still to this day, try to keep it pristine and still follow the Earth's laws and rules, if she has any. And the people who brought their laws and their religions without understanding the natural law of Earth,

You see how long it's not been there for them, as they were dealing with domination and war, disease, all those things that seem to be acceptable to them. And that's how all human beings play their lives out as humans. And so when they brought that, I think about how present-day, Native environmentalists…

There is no word for environmentalist for Native people. It’s just how we are, our thoughts are always placing Earth as our Elder.

And when we say things like “Land Back,” to the colonials, that would mean physical land, a material thing. So, they're resisting. Don't give them back the land that we won through war. Don't give them back that. Maybe give them a few acres and feed them candy for their own land. We don't wanna go back there 'cause that means we were in the wrong. And they don't want to admit the wrong, which brings about guilt, and the final shame and grief of not understanding. And the fear of death, actually.

So people who want to live forever, who don't understand death or living, are actually not understanding their own history. And their connection with this land, as far as they're concerned, is more of a relationship that we've already had and formed and still struggle to live here. And so this Land Back becomes materialistic in that sense of mindset, but to Native peoples, it's spiritual.

We wish everybody would think about Earth and land differently. Live, as we could say, as we did in the past, which this civilization cannot handle because it came from a history of disease, ignorance, and dogma. And so they're used to a ruling class. They're used to the Messianic ideas that there's one person that they're waiting on, meaning dogma.

So when they come and apply those rules, we heard the religions and we respected that, but we didn't do anything to try to take it away. We heard the laws, we tried to think about how they apply when we already had our own constitution, so to speak. And we didn't take those laws away from them.

And like I said, to be clear, they didn't bring the land. And it's been that way for the last 500 years. To understand the law, the land would be to understand Indigenous peoples. To understand Indigenous peoples would mean that you would have to live differently and listen to the Earth, rather than write a book and say, well, this is how we are going to measure the water, we're going to measure the land and trees and fruitfulness. Because that's the way of lacking consciousness, a lack of language.

Because that's what they were doing in Europe, they were starving. And only those who could kill more people could own more land and enslave their own people so that they became kings and queens. A very feudalistic system, which is still employed today in this so-called modern civility. And so they have to have an enemy to build up their castle in the sky.

What enemy they’ve made is actually continuing to have war against Earth. That's the true war. 'Cause they’ve lost their relationship. So having peace with Earth takes more thinking, more feeling, more involvement in daily life.

Every moment you make affects your decisions, you’re affecting the Earth. Will it hurt Earth first? And if it is, we don't go there. We don't have a word for superstition, by the way. So we can't be woo-woo people. Our languages were so pure before, and now they're diluted, so we don't understand as well, our truth as Native people.

And so we are succumbing somewhat to the mindset of nouns with obligations to dominance. And so it's very hard for people who really understand their own culture to understand the switching code, because our language cannot be translated into English. And English would say, well, that's impossible…But it is not possible when you're only fixated on nouns, persons, places, or things. Whereas the other ones, it's none of that. It's in relation to all. It's so connected. We are all one. You think about that, we are all one, there's no room for cultures. It's destroying cultures. There's only one God? I don't think so.

That's dogma, and that's the gathering of an energy to like, we're all gonna jump on the same ship and leave. We've been waiting for that. In Western culture, Western civilization, we've been waiting for that Messiah, in a sense, that leader to come forward. And we've been waiting and waiting and waiting, and I think we'll be waiting forever if we continue to live this extractive way of thinking through environmentalism.

Now, being in Standing Rock a few years ago, almost 10 years ago, I remember a few Native peoples coming. So many tents, maybe 20, 30. And then the Elders came from the reservations. Elders, not just old people. They came and they prayed for days and days, but they actually did Wocekiye, which is not a word for prayer.

We don’t have a word for prayer, we have a word, “Wocekiye,” which really means to cry out and to acknowledge relationship to all.

So they did the work that way in a spiritual, energetic way.

And they said, okay, the work is done. You don't have to go out and protest or anything, 'cause then we're kowtowing to their rules and their regulations. And if we really paid attention to that, the onslaught of environmentalists, whether conservationists, or conservatives, or liberals, 'cause both were environmentalists.

They knew better than we, who have experience with the land, to give you answers on what to do. So it was overrun by materialist thinkers, and it didn't allow the freeness of that Wocekiye to come out and be with the Natives there with the land. And so all these environmental thoughts are disconnected. So, we're being what it is to be, we are being Earth, Earth beings. So I think that's what I would think, in this long way around, about a relationship with Earth and environmentalism.

And it's based on the fact that we do not have a word for nature or the concept of it, but we have to always make allies. According to the Lakota, is that we have to make allies. We're not trying to make enemies. And as you see at Standing Rock, we didn't have guns or weapons. That was part of our vow, to always make friends or allies.

And a lot of people don't understand the complexity it takes to be spiritual. So a lot of the environmentalists came there, and they learned how to be spiritual. And this is something I heard from an Elder. And the spiritualists who came there learned how to be environmentalists. And for some reason, those two words rubbed together. What are we compromising with always having to change, break down, and fragment our language so that they understand?

'Cause we've been trying that for how many years here now? 500 plus years. And there's not been one change. The extraction still continues. Contamination of mother's blood, called water, contamination, and pollution in the air, you know, all these things. So climate change didn't start happening 'cause some scientists, you know, they measured something.

There's something that happened the minute they landed here. The climate inside of each Native person who was aware that that's when climate change is happening. So the confusion today is actually a climate crash within ourselves. So the confusion is the world.

The end of the world means the end of the way of living.

The way of the Earth is living. The world is, you know, at each other's throats. And I think it's the difference between responsibility and the right to land. First of all, we don't have the right to land unless they say we do, which doesn't make sense. We have, inherently, a responsibility to, for, and with land.

And this is why Americans, still living, see this beauty that was here. And they put up parks to preserve it. But it's how they're living, 'cause that park will get smaller and smaller. When to us, we didn't need the word or explanation for park, because all the land was a park, so to speak. And now we've broken it down, everybody has to have their own parcel of land so that we feel like we're kings or queens, and it's still feudalism, it's archaic.

Yeah. Thank you. That's a good question.

// musical intermission //

Kaméa Chayne: What I'm seeing is that a lot of people are operating from different perceptions of reality. And the tension between those different realities is kind of at the heart of our deeper crisis. I don’t want to oversimplify this, but broadly speaking, I feel like we're talking about imposed colonial rules of governance and the economy that, in my view, are not grounded at all in the reality of the laws of the land and the laws of the Earth.

Whereas Indigenous governance and kinship systems are deeply rooted in the very specific laws of a particular land base. And that looks different everywhere. And so I would argue that that form of reality is more real because it's rooted in deep listening and responsiveness, rather than like imposition or attempts to universalize.

And so, yeah, just even thinking about this example of taking care of a plant, like when the plant is showing signs of distress, if its leaves are yellowing, or if it's falling off. If I have the specific set of knowledge, then I would know how to respond to better care for this particular plant. But it's kind of like we're living in a world of imposed rules and realities that are totally out of touch with the language of the Earth.

So it's kind of a both/and where yes, we want to value a diversity of opinions and perspectives and so on, but at the same time, certain perspectives are more rooted, I think, in reality. But I think I have a hard time trying to articulate this when I also wanna refrain from a sort of self-righteousness.

I'd be curious what you've thought through, or how you approach, talking about these different layers of reality, and what it means to realign ourselves and our stories and ways of being with the ways of the Earth.

Tiokasin Ghosthorse: Yeah. First of all, look at thinking extractively. Am I thinking extractively? Do I want an answer from all that teaches me? And being through…

The education process here is not true to this land. It’s the difference between learning about Earth and learning from Earth.

I know there's a little thin veil there, but it makes a difference when you're learning from Earth who is teaching you. If you're learning about Earth, then the information is regurgitated. So we're stuck in this programming. And it's not that Native people were perfect, it's the fact that we understood that we weren't perfect, and we make mistakes, but we learn from the mistakes and learn how not to repeat them.

But the biggest mistake is that we don't want to admit that this way of living, which has to do with people who brought a process here, that we can just go on and trash Earth. If you learn from Earth, you're taking the perspective that there's a deeper knowledge from Earth because you've been living with Earth, understanding the processes that just start at a human level. These consciousnesses go from all directions, come from all directions. And if you're in the energy with the languages, the different words, like there are 26, 22 letters. In the alphabet, every word has energy.

It goes like “wa,” “ka,” “na,” “ba.” And all of these words go down until you come to even “xa” or “za.” These are all different energies. And to know that at a consistent level is to always be in touch with the world, with the Earth as a globe, that those same processes are happening to you. Now, if we cut off our natural selves from those energies, then we're only speaking a language that is killing that awareness, consciousness.

And only in English do we see Native people like, oh, that's the way they are. And meanwhile, if you really knew our language, we are not criticizing the way people live, the way people are. We always think about it. If you ever understand that, we think about the newcomers who came on ships, and not just that period, but those who follow the thinking of the ships, as always, younger brothers and sisters.

I know some people who are Native, who feel at fault because we haven't done our jobs of showing them how to live here. We understand the history that happened to us by the same mindset of destruction.

If you're on the losing end of destruction, you understand a lot more than if you were on the so-called winning side. You understand what being a victim is, and you understand what a perpetrator is.

But it's our fault if we continue to behave as victims because of a system that brought the winners and losers. And we always wanna be on the winning side.

And I think, yes, there are many layers, but how can you explain them in a language that is binary at base? How do you know that there's life beyond this life that we see? How do we know many cultures have been to other dimensions and have been able to return? Isn't that what the search for heaven is?

These things that are brought forward because of the biblical contexts, people tend to follow and fall into easily without question, because it's ruled through guilt, sin, and shame. And these are things that a lot of Native people can't feel the guilt of people who came later, 'cause that's not who we are as Native people.

We cannot feel the guilt that they feel, that they hide in denial language. So how do I take care of that? It's understanding that there's a great hurting, hurt, pain. And you see that in the youth. You see that in the hurry, scurry in the traffic jam. And you see it everywhere.

How do you explain to people what's going on? A lot of people think I am looking and criticizing a society that's hurting Earth, and it would seem that's what I'm doing. So it's really about understanding oneself. You don't have to go up to a high hill, on a mountain, and look for wisdom. It's a practicality. The common sense to understand.

To understand, I think his name is Ed Marshall. [Albert] Marshall, a Mi'kmaw Elder who said, there's so much information, so much knowledge. And it's okay if it's understood. And it's not bad for us, it's the fact that we rely on only those two things. But in the meantime, everyone is starving for wisdom. If we have wisdom, do we need information? Do we spend all of our lives gathering information without experiencing it?

Well, I think that's as much as I can answer to my understanding of your question.

Kaméa Chayne: Yeah. A through line that I'm sensing from a lot of what you're saying is that there are worldviews embedded in Indigenous languages that just cannot be translated into a language that is fundamentally not able to grasp those deeper worldviews, relationalities, and ways of seeing the world.

And most Indigenous languages, to my knowledge, historically, or even some still today, are oral languages, meaning that there's no written format. I think there's this general viewpoint that a lot of people never really questioned that written cultures are more advanced than oral cultures.

I found it really important to push back against that sort of linear value judgment because I'm like, arguably, given that change is the only constant of the Earth, oral cultures in that format of being spoken languages are actually more fluid in their relationship to knowledge.

By extension, they're also more in tune and responsive to the changing world. So, like you said, learning from Earth as opposed to learning about Earth. And maybe oral cultures are more suited in that format to continuously learn from Earth as opposed to learning about Earth.

So, things that don't really line up with the ongoing changes in the world in oral cultures, naturally become less relevant in the language and then maybe even obsolete at some point, just because it's like a built-in mechanism of that form of communication and knowledge sharing. So people don't even need to argue over things anymore because it just is.

Whereas I think when we're talking about these different layers of reality and we have imposed rules and logics and ways of governance that should be considered outdated and obsolete, because they're not responsive and they don't serve our collective wellbeing, they're so deeply inscribed that it's hard for them to even adapt and change course, even when the alarms of our need to change are so loudly in our faces.

And so, I wonder what else you'd like to add on what it means to relearn the languages of place and the land, given this junction point that we're at today. There's so much more to say to this. I mean, I have a lot of critiques on mainstream climate conferences that are held in particular locations, in particular languages, using the same tools and logics of the existing system. I'm like, how about everybody just go to the most place-based Indigenous communities and learn the Indigenous language of the land.

That's what I would like to challenge all environmentalists to do. Rather than congregate in these monolithic spaces, disperse and tap your roots into the ground as deeply as possible where you are. But yeah, just curious what else you might wanna add to all of these.

Tiokasin Ghosthorse: Wow. Yes. Let's start with this. In 2017, I was in a little bit of shock because I was looking at an older dictionary from the seventies. I like the smell of old paper for some reason. I opened it up and looked for this word, a simple word, daffodil. I looked it up, oh, it means this and that. So then I had a newer dictionary, and you can find this online too, but because AI is there now, you probably can find it.

But in a newer dictionary in 2017, I looked for the same word. It was not there. So then I began to look, and then finally I went on the internet and searched how many natural words were taken out of the current dictionary. And at that time, there were 43 because they didn't mean anything anymore. They were replaced with technical words, computer words. So I think we're losing the meaning of nature.

So I spent some time with friends, and I speak often with like-minded people who are not just worried, or their go-to is to become an environmentalist, or become sort of a false anthropologist and go to the places where Natives live and learn the languages. It's not that way. If you grew up in the nuances of the languages you understand, because each language is regionally based on the land. The understanding of that tree may not be the same understanding of a tree in the central United States. And so you begin to know the difference.

So you'd have to know many languages. My grandfather knew 15. I think he knew a few words in English, and he was born in the 1800s. So you think that's forever. And it is. And so I think I've thought about how they conveyed their energy and their meaning rather than the definition. We are losing meaning in the English language, and we're defining everything, period. And that's the final statement.

But as far as oral conditioning, oral thought, feeling, intuitive-based languages, which are Indigenous, there is no such thing artificially as being intuitive. So I'm thinking, we were visiting in Ithaca, and there was a storm coming, and there was this lightning flash. And I know, and other people who know, that there are a few seconds before you hear the rumble or the thunder.

Some friends were afraid of the lightning flash. It scares them. They're afraid of nature, which makes sense. And then comes the rumble, the thunder of what lightning left. And so there's a pause in between. Where is the understanding of the pause? Between the lightning and the thunder. And that's where, the Indigenous peoples, that's the energy.

And so it's the light and the sound combined to understand the energy that my Elders, my grandfathers, and grandmothers spoke when there was great pauses between meaning. If I understood the meaning between spaces, which is spatial thinking, and we never think about that, but there's fear because we're speaking in temporal concepts. Otherwise it goes from concept, and we hook that train, that car to that train, and concept to concept, whereas there's no meaning, there's only definition. And you take your place in that linear thinking. Meanwhile, the space that you think about, what was there? What is there? Did we forget that language and understanding these things differently?

I mean, I used to talk to elementary kids. I say, which word would you prefer that I speak about Earth with? Would I say Mother Earth or the Earth? I swear, everyone in that classroom, third graders, would say Mother Earth. And as you got older, we just got more scientifically influenced, they would say the Earth, the Planet.

So it became separated. So the language itself is separating you. And if we are brave enough, without criticizing, the source is coming from Indigenous peoples. We're saying, no, you don't invent more technology to solve the problem, because it makes you a looper. And we aggrandize ourselves because we invented AI, and it's artificial, made by man. But you cannot make intuition artificial. Nothing can be made artificial when it comes to intuition, 'cause all beings have it.

So, it's refraining from automatically switching code to English and trying to redefine it that way. 'Cause we're so imperialist that we say all human beings, rather than specifically the human beings. We are different, and we need to accept that difference and shore up cultures rather than the nationalism of civilization. 'Cause Earth is not gonna recognize that after a while. She wants cultures that know her. She teaches from Earth. And that's primitive to many people because of that influence of imperialism.

So Yeah. Thank you.

Kaméa Chayne: Yeah. I think about how when there is deforestation for an established, ancient, complex, biodiverse forest, when there's deforestation and then people try to reforest after it's been clear cut, there's a lot of complexity that has been lost in that process that can't just be regained as people replant the same species that we understand, 'cause there's networks, there's subtleties within that system that get lost.

So I think in a similar way with language loss, with the loss of Indigenous languages around the world, that has already happened and continues to happen, and as people try to revitalize Indigenous languages as second language learners, there's also a sort of inevitable flattening that already has happened.

So that even relearning the languages of place today, maybe it needs to go beyond just learning the vocabulary. Like, we need to actually tune in more deeply so that we can open ourselves back up to all of these subtleties that have been lost from the deforestation of languages. So yeah, a lot of deep, deep listening and regaining our capacities to be responsive to the land that needs to happen.

Tiokasin Ghosthorse: Exactly. That's a great idea.

When I was younger, there was a young woman who tried to save the forest by saving one tree in the old-growth forest in Oregon, I think it was. People adorned her with the accolades of environmentalists, a savior, it's gonna save the forest, or at least change perspective.

She stayed up there, I think, a year or so, in this old giant tree, old growth tree. And it came to a solution, you can cut the rest of the forest, but don't cut down this tree. So all the Elders of the forest were cut down, but that tree. Everybody came along and planted a new growth. The same age trees with no Elders to learn from.

And in human contrast, it's the same way. We don't have Elders because we're still in adolescence. And if you witness a herd of horses, they're the same. If you witness environmentalists' ideas on how to save the Earth, it's the same. There's disarray. We don't know how to grow up. They get twisted. They make fire hazards rather than learning how to protect from forest fires.

Understanding the Earth’s movements is that, in the end, we cannot save Earth… Earth has been saving us all along.

We just don't understand that. In the Lakota language and other Indigenous peoples, that's what we are endowed with, that thinking.

It doesn't mean we're better. People have to get away from that thinking. That's hierarchical, by the way, or worse. But egalitarian thinking is needed. And this doesn't mean that you have to give up your language, but learn other languages rather than the vocabulary of it, so we can put it in the dictionary and come up with a new, in this case, a Lakota dictionary, and add more definitions and take away the meaning.

So we're still in that box. It's not a paradox, but it's what I call a para-box. And it's the inferiority and the superiority. There is a beginning and an ending, which is time. Then there's the cause and effect. It's so pathological now that that's the box we live in. Why do we have to go outside to bring life to the box of civilization?

It's like the city. I've actually heard a city official say it out of New York a few years ago, that the answer is we move everybody into the city, we leave the land alone. And we go out there and bring whatever's left of living here, while we're losing the relationship with how to live with Earth all the time.

And farming is the same ideas that came over the seas. Yes, there were some peoples who were sedentary, but many peoples were not nomads because they were moving according to the stars, and that's their way. And some moved once in a while because their population was outgrowing the land. And so they would move or split into different people's groups. But those were respected because it was all about adapting to the Earth, rather than adapting the Earth to our needs. And we haven't come out of the thinking process yet.

So we can learn the Native languages, but the indoctrination remains. Once the papers of indoctrination are removed, then you still have the instilled, almost forced, indoctrination to think out of. But then you got into this craziness, we all got into the craziness of confusion, which our friend Alnoor asked about disgust in a sentence with me. He said, we're living in post comprehension.

We don't understand what's happening. We want to understand. We have all the Substacks. They keep changing names and places, and how to contact, communicate with each other through a little box. We named them MySpace when we were younger, some people weren't even born then, to Facebook, to now, Substacking everything, to different formats. We're looking for a way to communicate quickly, more efficiently. And that comes from being in the box, living in the box in one's mind.

And so we have to go outside and extract from Africa. Reasons why the UN is moving its base now to Africa. Because Africa contains a lot of minerals. They extract the minerals, the rare Earth has resources, has a lot. And you can put three continents into Africa and then some.

That's how big the land is. And we have to stop kowtowing to the idea that everybody came from Africa because at one time in our stories, all land was one. They call it Pangea. So there is not one true statement that we all came from Africa. 'Cause that's somebody's idea of evolving. I hate to say it, but I will, that the more lighter-skinned you are, the more acceptable and evolved you are.

And that's why the privilege of this racism and people of color are all boxed up. Who are the other people then? And it was difficult. I mean, here in the States, before 1978, a lot of Native peoples could not sit in a circle because it was illegal. We don't hear about those, how scalping didn't come from us. All that history that you hear, maybe in a tidbit during October 12th, or Columbus Day, or Thanksgiving.

Earth knows the history, the memory. She doesn't lose the memory.

She remembers, and one thing is she's generous. So you find that many Indigenous people who know their language behave the same. We're always grateful. Going back to imperialism, how can you be grateful when your land was destroyed? When we killed you off, when you lost the war? But those are all contrived stories about who we really are, because after all, do they know who they really are when they continue to search for who they really are?

So, bureaucracy, or whatever. All these systems don’t work with Earth. Religions don't work with Earth. Sciences do not work with Earth. They tend to imply that they do, but that information changes 'cause Earth changes.

And if we're not in the now, we're not into the Akantu of what's going on, then you'll see everything in catastrophe, without giving the original form of who we all are is the Indigeneity that we can't just claim to know. Because we have remnants of Indigenous thinking and beings.

And so, too many people jump in a hurry to be Indigenous without even knowing what the word means. Indigenous peoples, it means the poor ones over there, Indigenous, indigent, race over there, away, as Native people here are put away into concentration camps, which are now reservations.

And that leads to the history and curiosity, but it never leads back to who they still are from those times 1,000, 2,000, 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 years ago when their civilization started. And now it's spread like a disease, the rest of the virus, of destroying Earth rather than loving Earth.

It's where we personally left, learned how to be in love with ourselves without learning how to love ourselves. So there are a lot of layers, as you say, we have to be consistent and work on one. Then the next step. It's like coming out of addiction, and that takes a while. It takes years. But it's the addiction of behaving this modernity.

And when you understand it and don't want to get away from the privilege, you start complaining about how to keep it. You know, we could go on and on, I'm sorry.

Kaméa Chayne: Yeah, this is a lot to process. And I'm feeling called as we start to wind down our conversation to move into the emotional aspects of everything. Because I think for people who are really attuned to our more rooted realities of the state of the Earth, it's a lot.

I think never in the course of human history has an individual mind and heart needed to hold and bear witness to so much pain and suffering at this global level. And so maybe we're not supposed to metabolize this kind of grief by ourselves. But for sensitive souls who are really struggling today, maybe seeing these legacies of colonial trauma playing out in very personal ways in their own families, or just being really conscious of the world's many layers of crises, that nothing we do can ever feel like it's really enough, so it feels like we're just trying to stay afloat.

How do you personally hold it all? And what would you tell people who are really having a hard time processing the weight and immensity of everything and who can't compartmentalize? Because these things just bleed into every aspect of our daily lives.

How do we honor all of this pain and emotional weight of everything while also staying open to being present to the magic and the beauty of everything at the same time?

Tiokasin Ghosthorse: Well, several words you said. Let's begin with magic. As I understood it from an understanding of where the language came from in Latin, magic, and that word comes from magi.

“Magi” means to use the tools of the Earth properly. What does a bird do? It makes magic by flying. The fish makes magic by swimming in something we cannot live in.

You think about all those processes that these animals or beings live by and through, it's magic to us. And to a lot of people, it's primitive. Oh, we used to be, and we don't think, we don't have consciousness. But if you go forward with the word Wakan in our language, in English, it simply means to be conscious. To consciously apply mystery to everything. And you have to be conscious.

If you're true to that consciousness, you won't be compelled to keep making the same mistakes. And since I put it in those words to apply, it's not like you're looking for a job. One of my mentors says that we, as Indigenous peoples, have always been employed by Earth. We get paid through clean air, clean water, clean food, clean land. And we're not doing our jobs. So what does the Earth react to?

Same thing that's going on here, the confusion a little bit. And also, yes, the consciousness. And for me, the Lakota is thinking, I know, I think differently. It's there and it's easy to apply. But for instance, a small statement, people would come and say, how's life treating you, Tiokasin? And they would get a little thrown off by me replying to them, well, it's not about how life's treating me, it's about how am I treating life? And not just other human beings? So if we thought non-anthropocentrically, that it's just not us human beings, it's about all life that makes us human beings.

So these are simple things that we can do, think. Even a language, if one is not compelled to learn another language, Indigeneity, not just, well, I know English now. I know Spanish, I know French. That's the same thinking process. It's noun-based. And so to go outside of that, look away from centralized Europe, that way of colonialism, and against the understanding of what consciousness means to be in the moment, and not just be afraid.

I asked my Maori friend, George Nuku, who I’ve known for 20-plus years, if they have the word future in their language. And he says, “No, in a sense, we can't understand it. Life is not a circle, it’s a spiral. It’s not going up or down.”

So you look at your fingerprints, you look at your spiral in your head, it's everywhere. And so he said, imagine yourself at the moment now, and you're walking backwards into the future.

He says, we are not afraid of the future by walking backwards because we recognize where we've been in the past. So what are we afraid of? So if you understand the past, you will not be afraid of the future, and you won't make the same mistakes. That's an evolutionary process, a natural process of thinking about time, thinking about space, and the continuum.

So I would leave that in thought and be purposeful about being conscious. 'Cause it takes a while. You just can't get it by reading a book or someone who knows better about what knowledge is. You get it by experiencing yourself in your life, understanding what consciousness is about. Yeah.

Kaméa Chayne: Thank you so much. We are coming to a close here, but it's been an incredible honor to share this time and conversation with you. So, thank you so much again.

And as we close off, where can people go to support your work, and what closing words of guidance and wisdom do you have for us as Green Dreamers?

Tiokasin Ghosthorse: Wow. We consider wisdom as common knowledge, common sense.

So there's really no wisdom. It's common sense, and we've lost that, and we need to find that again. So, to understand even more is the updating of many Indigenous people's voices through First Voices Radio.org. And it's been updated now. I was in radio, as of July 6th of this year, I started in 1992. 33 years later, I'm moving on to other things. And I think I've moved something a little bit there because of, not just the numbers who listened, but I see actual changes in people who have really listened to what other Indigenous peoples were saying.

And from someone scholarly to the simple. And I don't want experts, I want people who are experiencing. I don't want people who are stuck in information and knowledge. I want to listen, I want to communicate with people who are thinking, I wanna know what you're thinking.

That means, like in this presence, you and I are speaking. So two months from now, things might have changed. So when people are hearing or listening to this recording, things might have changed. But always hold these ideas of First Voices. Are we listening to First Voices anymore within ourselves?

So be true to those things that you knew when you were younger. Even now, I'm on Facebook, and it's my only social format. People are trying to make me join or help me join other formats, but I'm just satisfied with that.

I don’t want to just, you know, spread myself thin. So, yeah, Facebook is the only place, Tiokasin Ghosthorse.

 
kaméa chayne

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